Category: gaming

Happy Halloween! Tonight I went over to my friends’ house to help them hand out candy to the Trick-or-Treaters. Where I live doesn’t get many kids these days, but their neighborhood still does. I didn’t dress up (unless you count “woman with enough nerve to wear bright-ass lipstick” a costume) because obviously Halloween is amateur hour and as a cosplayer, I reserve that stress and work for convention times. I kid, of course. I tried on a couple old costumes this afternoon but I couldn’t muster up the excitement to wear any of them. Ugh, wigs. Ugh, shapewear. Ugh, costume makeup. Not today, Satan. Not today.

Anyway, at our little get-together, my pal Jason brought a game he had helped fund on Kickstarter called Escape: Zombie City. Seemed pretty appropriate for Halloween! Each game session was 15 minutes long. There was spooky background music that timed the game and helped set the mood. We played four games before we won (on the easiest mode, it must be said). It’s very fast-paced, and since there weren’t turns (everyone plays at the same time), you didn’t get bored waiting for someone else to make a move.

The plot of the game is that you’re survivors of a zombie apocalypse, and you need to explore a randomly and continuously user-generated city to find items, return them to your safehouse, stock up your escape van, and leave the city. All while avoiding the undead, of course. We started playing on the coffee table, but then when we kept adding map tiles that went off the edges and dropping our dice, we moved to the floor. I’m pretty sure my back is going to punish me for that tomorrow.

It was really fun! (Once we figured out what we were doing!) It’s fun and fast, and everyone eventually was yelling at each other for assistance. I liked that it was a cooperative game, not pitting us against one another. I look forward to playing this one again!

Zed made three kinds of pesto on Sunday. The first is like pesto butter. We’ve just been smearing it on bread. It’s very nice. There’s one with roasted red peppers and one normal one. He got pretty frustrated with the blender when he was making it. He was shoving skewers into the bottom to try and dislodge stuck basil. I thought he was going to electrocute himself or something.

Last night was D&D. Kaya got killed again. So sad. Stupid dwarven waraxes and their x3 criticals. The party got her reincarnated. She came back as a Lizardfolk. So now she’s a pretty hideous reptilian humanoid… but! She got a lot of nice perks with the body swap, the best of which was a +5 natural armor bonus. R☆ pointed out that that’s like I saved over 50,000 gold pieces (what an amulet of natural armor +5 would cost). So I guess it’s not too bad? Also, the +2 strength and constitution is nice. Even though she went down a level, Kaya has more hit points than before.

Blogger made me upgrade my blog. That annoyed me. But I guess it didn’t change anything, so that’s good. I was worried that since I have some special customizations (thanks Barbara May!) that aren’t part of the standard Blogger/Blogspot templates, everything would get screwed up somehow.

If you’re a LiveJournal user and want this blog on your friends page, click here. Rosy set up an LJ RSS feed thingy for me.

D&D this week was wrapping up the end of the adventure, so not much happened there. Kaya is now the owner of a lovely mithril chain shirt. We got Effvar resurrected instead of having R☆ roll up yet another character. Effvar, previously a halfling, came back as an elf.

I had to buy gas five days shy of one month. Still, I think I did a pretty good job. Let’s keep up with that, self. The whole train and walking thing is good for you.

My hair is now long enough to pull back into a stubby nape ponytail (three to four inches, I would say). Hurrah for hair of one length!

I have a new recipe (Chocolate Oat bars), but I’m holding off on posting it for a while. There’s probably going to be a dry spell coming up (er, a drier spell, I should say), and I’ll need to spread out my postings of consequence a bit.

Mother’s Day is this weekend. I’m making brunch on Sunday. Exciting stuff! I’m not going to say what I’m making, because it’s a surprise. Unless my dad told my mom, in which case it’s not.

Ha HA! The ANTM spoiler I read was wrong! Furonda stayed! Man, I was so surprised when they sent Nnenna home. It’s not like Nnenna really needs this competition, anyway. Now that she’s gotten some exposure through the show, I’m sure she’ll get signed quickly. Ee, I’m so happy Furonda didn’t get cut.

(Yes, I dork out over America’s Next Top Model. What?)

So, tonight at D&D was very exciting. My character almost died.Zed ‘s character (our wizard) almost died. We ran away from that battle! However, although we didn’t earn any experience at all, we did get a bunch of money. I hope Kaya lives long enough to collect her mithril chain shirt. (Well, actually, R☆’s first character, Hitch, put in the order, but then he got all dead and stuff.)

I’ve been trying not to use my car this week. I think I’ll be able to make it to Saturday, but then I’m going over to Barbara May’s to hang out with her, Sara, and Kiddo, and I’m toting my unfinished Katamari costume pieces. Hopefully I’ll get Honey finished in a positive direction.

I got contacted by the guy setting up the Katamari Bay to Breakers. Man, I bet that’d be crazy, and possibly very fun. But even if I switched out my red shoes for comfortable black walking shoes (they’d at least go with the overall color scheme), I just don’t think I could last with that head weighing me down (not to mention that with the face plate up, the heads look less good, and I’d have to have it up to see where I was going). Posing for pictures and walking around conventions is much easier. Imagine that!

Wow. We have lost two party members in two weeks. Last week our halfling cleric, Tibbet, was killed by an ogre. This week, our bard/warmage Hitch was killed by a howler, a kind of spiked demon dog. We also left Hitch’s body behind as we ran the hell away. Bad comrades! Kaya’s character has been moving from “foolhardy” to “paranoid” and now to “COWARD.”

(I sort of think our party name should be The Quick and the Dead. Of course, that probably wouldn’t inspire confidence in anyone who was looking for an adventuring party.)

I made this multigrain bread on Sunday. It’s really quite tasty. I used a mixture of sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds (because strangely enough, I had pepitas in my freezer). I need to mix together some honey butter. I think that’d taste fabulous on this.

Well, that was surprising. Jacob, the TWoP recapper for Doctor Who, got in touch with me about my problems with his D&D reference. Apparently I was overthinking the joke- what a shocker!

At first Jacob explained that he was using the d20 roll to imitate the non-player-character behavior of the TARDIS against the Doctor. I replied, asking if the Doctor has to make a diplomacy check every time he wants to travel somewhere, or whether it was more like a will save that the TARDIS had to make in order to be influenced/controlled by the Doctor. Jacob agreed that it was more like a will save, but that on its simplest level, the joke was merely that there were 20 things that could go wrong with the TARDIS, and that each time the Doctor was making a roll to see which outcome he’d get.

This entry is really just so I can end with this testament to my nerdliness and obsessive nitpickery. “I just didn’t think anybody would catch the reference in the first place, so it bugs me that it didn’t make sense. I should have worded it better.” Yaaaaay.

The Doctor and Rose come running up against a barricade, still miles from ground zero, and converse at length about how amazing it is and how this is First Contact and the doctor is so lucky to…be there, or something. I don’t know — he’s got a time machine. I don’t understand how…so the TARDIS just runs all roughshod and 1d20 over him all the time? That’s how it goes? No wonder he acts like a kid all the time.

This is a bit from the Television Without Pityrecap of the Doctor Who episode “The Aliens of London.” Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s referring to the teleport spell, correct? Which even I know is a d% (2d10 is totally different from a d20). I may suck hardcore at playing spellcasters, but I do remember that time Merreck transported us and Scott rolled poorly. Our party landed way off course, in the ocean. We would have drowned, but thankfully Merreck had another teleport left for the day (and this time, the roll was better).